Yes, absolutely (and, with an old political technique, who'd say "no"?!). Whether it's Maemo Greeters, an elected representation of the Community (whomever that may be), forum structures & moderators, QA process, Extras (minimising fragmentation of repositories) and so on.

There is a common thing for everyone here: Maemo. It isn't (and never really has been) a generic portable gadget site (like Carrypad, say). If Maemo (or a natural evolution, like MeeGo, which meets the majority's requirements) ceases to be the binding element, I suspect the answer for each individual will be different (whether it's iPhone, Android, PalmOS, featurephones, Kindles, iPods, MP3 players) and that will result in an overall and natural diminishing of the site.

Trying to resurrect maemo.org as a generic gadget site to grow it to serve a "diverse population of engaged users" I think would be hard. What do you mean by "engaged users" - engaged to what? If it's a general gadget lust, I'm not sure it'd be sustainable: the forums would be overrun by threads for various different devices, the rest of the site (and therefore the rest of the community) would be useless (Garage isn't best-of-breed, and the admin overhead of Bugzilla would be enormous).

As much as it can be known, yes. However, Nokia have committed to maintaining the site and providing resources for it (see the recent meeting minutes) , as long as there's a community, there can be a site. It's therefore up to the community to stay active and engaged, and that's what makes putting any sort of useful timetable in place impossible.

Actually, there is a timetable we could put in place; we could ask Nokia to pull the plug in two months time, and advertise that as a timetable. Or pin it to X months after an event (say the announcement of the Harmattan device).

But I can't imagine that having a definitive timetable is actually more important than maintaining a home for the Maemo community whilst there is a Maemo community. And there might very well be a viable and vibrant Maemo community in ten years time: the N900 could be the last good device, the same way that I think the Psion Series 5mx was the last good PDA (and my N900 still has gaps which mean it's not a complete replacement). With the numbers that the N900 has sold, and the possibility of getting engaged developers working on the Community SSU (however slight that may be), if the Harmattan device - or a competitor device - doesn't meet most N900 user's use-cases, the Maemo community could be here for a very long time.

Of course, if the Harmattan device does meet the vast majority's use cases, all app development ceases; no posts are made here; MeeGo is a viable day-to-day OS for anyone who doesn't get the Harmattan device and no-one maintains the community SSU, it may very well be that maemo.org is useless within 6 months of the Harmattan device launch.

Unfortunately, the only thing the Council can do to influence which of those it is more likely is to encourage development, collaboration and engagement and then facilitate to make sure everyone's aware of it.